VOICES OF AI
Artificial intelligence is rapidly transforming the language of filmmaking, opening new creative possibilities while challenging traditional ideas about storytelling, production, and authorship. As artists around the world experiment with these emerging tools, a new generation of filmmakers is defining what cinema can become in the age of AI.
We want to hear the stories and learnings directly from the creators behind the shortlisted films of the 2025 Shortest AI Film Festival, presented by Forward and LTX Studio. The competition invited creators worldwide to produce original AI-generated films of up to 60 seconds using LTX Studio. From hundreds of submissions, a selection of standout works was shortlisted and showcased at the festival, celebrating innovative storytelling and creative experimentation with AI. Through their reflections, these filmmakers share how they approached AI as a creative partner, the challenges they encountered, the workflows they developed, and the lessons they learned along the way.
We asked a diverse group of filmmakers, artists, designers, and creative technologists, including Ivan Yeh, Phoebe Jaspé, Sijin Liu, Ira Lee Gathers, Nicholas Flandro, Michael Leonhartsberger, Chris May, and Paul Rozenboim some questions. Coming from backgrounds spanning animation, design, visual arts, music, interactive media, and filmmaking, they share how they use AI in their creative practice, where they see its limitations, and why human perspective remains at the center of meaningful storytelling.
What initially drew you to AI as a creative tool?
Ivan Yeh: Before working deeply with AI, many visual ideas stayed only as concepts because they required a large team, budget, time, or technical resources to bring them to life. As someone who comes from both data and creative backgrounds, I was fascinated by how AI could turn a sentence, an image, or a rough idea into something visual, emotional, and cinematic.
It became a creative partner that allowed me to explore ideas faster, test different visual directions, and build worlds that would have been difficult to create through traditional methods alone. For me, AI opened up a new kind of creative freedom.
Pheobe Jaspé : I became interested in the strange space between control and accident. You give the machine an instruction, but sometimes it returns with a dream, a glitch, or a small digital creature. That unpredictability became part of the attraction.
Sijin Liu: I've been in this industry for around fifteen years now, so I know how an animation gets built up from nothing, and I know how a film gets shot. So when AI first started generating images, what I saw was something very practical: it could quickly help me work out a colour plan and speed up the early testing. That kind of work used to eat up so much manpower, money and time before you'd even built up a usable library of references. AI just handles that part fast, which lets me put my energy into the actual creating rather than collecting material. That said, I still keep the hand-drawing in my process, because AI still can't fully get what's in your head onto the screen.
How would you describe your own creative voice, and where do you see the balance between human creativity and machine assistance?
Ira Lee Gathers: Sensory experience. Fragments of emotion, fleeting textures, and colours that feel like memories. I feel that the most valuable skills of the next decade won't be typing prompts. They'll be judgment, ethics, systems thinking, storytelling, and taste. AI can generate a thousand assets and a billion possibilities. It cannot decide which one matters or which futures are worth collectively building.
Nicholas Flandro: My personal aesthetic is very much rooted in absurdity and surrealism. I guess I have a post-Dada sensibility. Generative AI fits perfectly with that. It honestly feels like it's made for that, as it hallucinates accidentally and sometimes those results end up being my favourite.
As of this moment human creativity has a foundational role in the best work and I don't see that changing. GenAI is derivative, as all art is, so taking it to a new place is the responsibility of the creator.
Michael Leonhartsberger: What I find most interesting is not 'pure AI', but the combination of AI with other things: my own typefaces, my design work, my music, my references, my taste. The details matter: what you select, what you reject, what kind of imagery you are drawn to, what colors, textures, films, music or visual references have shaped you. AI can generate material, but the direction still comes from the person using it.
Chris May: Working with AI isn't about surrendering authorship, it's about collaborating with a system of possibility, guiding it, filtering it, disrupting it when needed.
Can you recall a moment when AI genuinely surprised you?
Nicholas Flandro: Midjourney generated an image of a man with a button up oxford shirt and another white oxford shirt on his head. When I animated it it appeared that his pants were on backwards as he walked. It is still my favorite clip from the video. I did not prompt for that and for the rest of the project I tried to find that level of absurdity but couldn't quite match it. That clip remained the 'north star' for that project, taking it in a direction that wasn't totally planned but was very much appreciated. I encounter limitations all the time. You just need to know how to work around them.
Ivan Yeh: I actually enjoy leaving a certain amount of blank space in my prompts. Instead of controlling every detail, I sometimes allow the AI to decide what kind of emotion it wants to express. In some experiments, I even use the same image as both the first frame and the last frame, letting the AI figure out how to create the movement, transition, or emotional progression in between.
Through the process, I realized that AI was not only useful for making spectacular or futuristic images. It could also be used to create intimacy, awkwardness, humor, and vulnerability.
Sijin Liu: It was probably the first time I made a music video with AI. The tech was still really unstable back then, and our team's plan was basically: if AI doesn't work out, we've still got traditional production skills to finish the MV. To our surprise, AI could actually pull off the movement and animation we'd imagined pretty quickly, which saved us a huge amount of time.
That was the first time I realised AI could genuinely shift my creative direction, because it broke through so many limits. But AI can just hand you the exact thing the shot actually needs.
Pheobe Jaspé: AI surprises me in both directions. Sometimes it produces something better than the image I had imagined. At other times, it becomes impossible to create something very precise. AI can produce beautiful accidents.
Paul Rozenboim: AI surprised me by helping me build things I couldn't have built before. I've been using it to create interactive experiences, small apps, and custom scripts. My coding knowledge is intermediate, but if I know what I want to build and can explain it clearly, AI helps me turn those ideas into something real much faster.
As AI continues to evolve, what role do you think human value, authenticity, and personal expression will play in creative work?
Ira Lee Gathers: The future belongs to discovery. Learn what is going on in front of and behind the screen, be conscious of your effect, and input. It's 2026, and limits no longer exist.
Pheobe Jaspé: As hyperrealistic images become easier to generate, a personal voice becomes more valuable. Authenticity does not mean rejecting technology. It means using it without surrendering to it. The artist still brings their environment, memories, humor, obsessions, and contradictions. AI can generate an infinite number of images. The human task is still to decide which ones deserve to exist.
Chris May: As AI makes it easier to replicate and generate high-quality images and video, the question will shift from “how was this made?” to “why does this exist?” Technical novelty fades quickly. Personal point of view lasts longer.
Michael Leonhartsberger: I think craft will still have its place. Maybe even more so. AI enables a lot of exploration, but taste is something different. Taste develops over time by seeing many things, being drawn to certain worlds, collecting references and slowly understanding what resonates with you.
There will definitely be a shift, and not just in the creative industry. A lot of areas will change, probably faster than we can fully understand right now. What I love about the creative industry is working with people and making something for people.
Check out the creators on Instagram:
@iraleeiswack
@unapaulogetic_
@i.am.aiiivan
@pheobejaspe
@ncflandro
@michael.leonhartsberger
